


Something You Remember

by Isagel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, M/M, Memories, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovered Memories, Recovery, Size Difference, Size Kink, Starting Over, Strength Kink, small Steve in a large body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-03 20:16:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1756093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isagel/pseuds/Isagel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Bucky's memories, Steve is so small.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in ages, so I'm just going to go ahead and post this story scene by scene as I write it. It will earn the "explicit" rating soon enough.

“Tell me something you remember,” Steve says.

It's a game they play now, since Steve found him, since Steve brought him back to himself, to someone vaguely resembling the man he used to be. Something to while away the time on nights like this, crouched on a rooftop with the barrel of his sniper rifle resting on the balustrade, waiting for the bad guys to step into his sights, Steve's voice in his ear from somewhere down on the ground. He would call it a game, if his memories weren't the cards he plays.

He breathes in, lets the ripple of moments wash through him. Images and absences, the flashes of things retrieved and the dark contours of things still lost. His hands keep steady. The crosshairs don't waver.

He must be silent for too long, though, because Steve speaks again.

“Bucky?”

Just a voice, and sometimes he forgets what goes with it. Sometimes he turns at the sound of his name and has to snap his head up to look Steve in the eye. Maybe he used to do that in the time before, too, in their time during the war, but he can't be sure. Maybe at some point he stopped. Maybe he's just forgotten the part where he got used to the change.

Steve's voice reaching out to him over the comms - hesitant, small - and he hasn't played that card yet, so he does.

“You're always so little in my memories,” he says. “It's easier to remember you like that. I mean, it's sharper, that sense of you. When I think of touching you, there's the feel of bones poking through your skin into my palm. I can remember holding onto you, holding you back. Grabbing hold of you to keep you from rushing head first into some fight you were bound to lose. Your wrist almost getting lost in my hand, it was so thin. Like it could snap clean off if you pulled hard enough. That's something I remember.”

It's quiet here on the roof, the stillness of a place above the streets. A warm gust of wind brushes his hair against his cheek; he'll have to correct against that when it comes time to fire. 

Steve's intake of breath is sharp in his ear.

“Your hand was so large,” he says, so softly Bucky has to strain to hear him. “I always thought of you as big, even after. I...”

A yellow light floods Bucky's vision through the scope, spilling from inside the building opposite out into the back yard as a door opens.

“Look sharp, Cap,” he says, focused now, cutting Steve short. “It's happening.”

There are three men in the doorway, talking. No, four. He recognizes two from the briefing as close associates of Johnson.

“Cut me a path, Sergeant,” Steve says. 

Bucky releases the safety.

Steve still rushes headlong into a fight, a streak of red, blue and white across the dark yard, but these four guys together couldn't snap his little finger if they tried, not any more. 

Bucky still drops them before they get a chance.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey, hey, careful there!” Steve says and reaches out to catch Bucky by the arm before he can stumble head first into the parking lot. The roadhouse has steps. It seems he's had too many shots of whiskey for steps.

“Guess this is why pop always said a man shouldn't drink alone, huh?” he says, straightening himself with the aid of Steve's grip and the rough wooden bannister. He's slurring a little, his words sloppy at the edges.

“Good thing you're not alone any more, then,” Steve says. In the red light from the sign above the bar, his smile is gentle but sad. “Come on, buddy.”

He sets off across the parking lot, guiding Bucky to follow. Their motel is only on the other side of the open space, and Bucky's pretty sure he isn't going to fall over now that he's on level ground, but Steve's hand stays on his arm, a steady touch. He lets himself lean into it, his metal shoulder against Steve's solid muscle.

He thought he needed to be alone, when he came over here, but this is better. More right, even if the fit is different than it used to be.

Steve always finds him, no matter how dark the place.

“You always brought me home safe,” he says, the honesty of a drunkard, and there's more there, behind that sentiment, than he can consciously remember. Big things and small, their history lurking just outside his field of vision.

“Not always,” Steve says, so quietly it could almost be to himself, and Bucky is sure their flashes of memory in that moment are the same: an image of snow and falling, and the heavy mechanical sound of a speeding train. There's a chill up his spine, though the evening is warm and all he really hears are cicadas in the grass, the steady stream of traffic on the highway. “And anyway,” Steve adds, louder, brighter, making an effort to push that memory away, “you've done the same for me plenty of times.”

“Yeah?” Bucky says. “Tell me something you remember.”

It's usually Steve who asks. Bucky is the one recovering from amnesia, the one whose memories need to be coaxed out and shared to feel real. Some times he's scared to hear Steve's version of events before he's recovered his own, afraid Steve's perspective will blot out his and he will never know what he thought at a given moment, what he felt.

But today the Hydra base they found was abandoned, just like Natasha's intelligence suggested, empty except for row upon row of filing cabinets, of documents detailing Hydra's work. The Winter Solder was in there, of course. The Winter Soldier featured prominently in those files.

The things he remembers tonight are ugly and dark, too much blood and pain in them to speak of. Too much cold for the whiskey to warm through.

There's always warmth in Steve's memories.

Steve hesitates a moment, his fingers closing tighter on Bucky's upper arm. Bucky can feel his gaze on him, though he doesn't meet it. He keeps his eyes on the ground, focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

“I remember in '38,” Steve says, “I sold that series of drawings I did of workers on the docks. And we went out to celebrate. I was such a lightweight drunk then, before I stopped being able to get drunk at all. I'm not even sure where we went. Some place with a band and lots of pretty girls I didn't have the guts to dance with. What I remember clearly is you taking me home afterward. Your arm around my shoulders, keeping me steady as we walked through the streets. It had been raining. I talked about the way the headlights of the passing cabs reflected in the puddles, about how to capture it in a watercolour. I doubt I made much sense, but I liked the feel of you listening. Those rickety stairs up to my mom's apartment – my apartment, it was just me by then – were wet with rain, and when I slipped and lost my footing, your arm tightened around me, and you held me up. Lifted me, almost, up the last few steps. I liked that, too. Feeling your strength like that, the sudden reminder of how light I was, in your hands. I liked that a lot.”

Bucky remembers it, too, then. The smell of summer rain on the city, the liquor on both their breaths. The pull of Steve's falling body, the reflex to tug him closer to hold him safe. It's visceral, the way the moment strikes him, suddenly come to life, the memory of Steve against him so immediate it knocks the breath out of him, leaves his mouth dry.

“You were hard,” he says, not thinking, the words leaving his mouth in the same instant he knows they're true. “I could feel you, up against my leg when I held you close.”

They've stopped, now, already at the long row of motel rooms. Bucky isn't sure which door is his, but he's willing to bet Steve has that covered. He can't seem to care.

Face to face, Steve's hand still on his arm, and Steve looks down, looks away, a flush high on his cheekbones. His tongue darts out to wet his lips.

“I told you,” he says. “I liked it.”

Bucky raises his hand, the one still made of flesh and blood, and cups Steve's cheek. The liquor makes it easy to trace the contour of Steve's mouth with his thumb.

“I can't believe I didn't come inside with you,” he says. “You were so gorgeous. I wanted to fuck you like that, eager and pliant.”

“You could have stayed,” Steve says. His voice is so soft. “I would have liked that, too. Being that helpless for you.”

“I was being a gentleman,” Bucky says. Such an odd thing to remember, taking that step back. When the Soldier saw something helpless, he stepped in close and broke its neck.

“I know,” Steve says. “One of your better traits.”

His hand drifts downwards, over the line of Steve's jaw, fingertips against the broad column of his throat. 

“It's been a long time since anyone trusted me with helpless things,” he says. He remembers how Steve's throat had looked, back then, vulnerable under the width of his palm; how soft his skin had been there, paper-thin over pounding blood. “I miss it.”

Steve lays his hand over his, squeezes it, pressing the heel of Bucky's hand, for just a second, against the hollow of his throat.

“Me, too,” he says. “I miss it all the time.” He lets Bucky's hand drop, into the space between them. Strokes Bucky's arm before letting go of that, too. “Do you have your room key?” he asks.

He doesn't take Bucky farther than to his door.


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky doesn't say, when he's sober: _I remember jerking you off, my hand on your dick a touch between friends, sixteen years old, the misty sunlight from the window of your mother's apartment clinging to your hair, brushing the long, narrow line of your neck when you tipped your head back, gasping. I wanted to keep the moment like one of your drawings._

He doesn't say: _I remember the weight of you, sitting astride me, lighter than a girl, my hands spanning your ribcage, tracing the delicate ladder of your bones. Your heart beat quick like a bird's when you moved to take me in._

He doesn't say: _I remember holding you down, I remember you beneath me. Remember you pinned and open, remember the wide stretch of your lips around me, the curved line of your vertebrae under my fingertips when I wrapped you fragile in my arms._

He doesn't say: _Those are some things I remember._

He thinks it, though. In the darkness of whatever room he happens to be sleeping in, in the morning when he turns his face up into the spray of water from the shower. Running with Steve in the early evening along busy Brooklyn streets - the same and changed, as they are - he thinks: _I remember._

The Winter Soldier didn't have desires. They were burned out of him along with everything else, leaving only what Hydra had put there, what Hydra could control. But he wants things now. With every memory washed back up to the surface of his mind, he wants something new, something more, something so old and familiar his body aches with not having it. 

He remembers Steve, and he is alive.


	4. Chapter 4

They are running in the park when the rain hits, a sudden torrent that drives them in under the trees, beneath the branches of a great elm. It's dry there, almost, only stray droplets managing to find their way through the thick foliage to the ground.

Bucky sits down in the grass, his knees drawn up, his back to the trunk of the tree. Steve does a few stretches, then flops down beside him.

Beyond the tree's reach, the world is misted grey with falling water, blurred shapes of people moving in the distance, turning umbrellas and coat-collars up against the rain, scurrying to get to the shelter of wherever they are going.

Bucky runs his fingers through his wet hair, combing it back from his face. He thinks again about cutting it, about the person he was when he wore it regulation short to go with his sergeant's stripes, about the person he isn't. Beside him, Steve's breathing is slowing after the all-out run, a warm, well-known sound, close beneath the cover of the rain. He wonder's what Steve's hands would feel like in his long hair.

"Tell me something you remember," Steve says.

He knows this one, knows what this is, to both of them - the wet and the scent of grass and forest, the tapping of raindrops on the leaves. It's a hundred moments spent together during the war, standing guard outside camp behind enemy lines, or doing reconnaissance, watching in the quiet for where the German's would be, for when to strike. Or, some times, simply seeking privacy, finding a chance to be on their own, away from the rest of the squad. 

There is a memory of Steve up against a tree, pulling him in, hands on his waist, on his cheek, a memory of how close his face was, eye to eye, and how his own heart skipped with fear.

"I remember the first time we kissed," he says, before he has time to bite it back. "After you rescued me in Austria."

Steve lets out a breath, sudden, as if surprised by a punch. Bucky doesn't turn to look at him, but he can see Steve's hands, his palm rubbing against his thigh, skin dragging against the fabric of his grey sweats.

His voice comes out distant, flat.

"That was... That was strange," he says, and it's honest, Steve is always so painfully honest. "I was so happy you were there, that I had you safe with me. But..."

"But it was strange," Bucky agrees. "I know. All the angles were wrong. I didn't know where to put my hands, how to touch you."

It scares him, to talk about it. They never talked about it back then, never tried to put words on it, beyond jokes and teasing. Somehow that person he was then had known how to reassure and defuse with humour, but perhaps that's another part of him that Hydra's severed for good. All he has now are plain words, and there's something here he needs to get at, something he needs to reach.

"It was exciting," Steve says, "to be tall enough to kiss you without having to tug you down to my level. And at the same time it felt like I wasn't me, like it wasn't me touching you. Not my body. The span of my hand on your face was wrong. I couldn't make any of it fit."

That Steve, that Captain America Steve who was holding him, was beautiful, perfect in every way. But as he stepped closer, as he let Steve reel him in - his Steve who had come for him when no one else would - he was near crying with loss for what Steve had been, that delicate beauty he would never see again. When they kissed, he tasted desperation in his mouth.

Under the shelter of this tree, in the present, he runs his tongue over his lips and swallows down the flavor of the past.

"It got better, though," he says and turns to look at Steve, to see him. "I remember we made it better?"

It comes out sounding like a question. He doesn't dare to trust what's in his own head. There are live mines waiting in the blank spaces; he can't be sure this isn't one of them.

But Steve smiles, so close to him, face flushed from running, skin damp with rain. His head is tilted back, his temple resting against the bark of the tree. 

"Then we remember the same thing," he says. 

He lays his hand on Bucky's where it's resting in the grass, strokes his thumb over Bucky's knuckles. Warmth on cold metal, and the touch is so gentle. It almost makes him jerk away, almost makes him get up and run. The Soldier wasn't forged to be treated gently. 

If he ran, Steve would find him. 

The knowledge of that is dizzying.

He stays.

"Can I kiss you now?" he says.

Steve's smile widens. Bucky is aware of the deeper rise and fall of his chest, the renewed quickness of his breath. He wants to put his hand there, over the water stained fabric of Steve's shirt, and feel his heart beat.

"Yes, Steve says. "Please." His fingers tighten on Bucky's hand, squeezing. "We'll make it better this time, too."

When Bucky's lips touch his, all he tastes is rain and longing, and the certainty of Steve's strength. They're both different, but that last part has always been the same.


End file.
